Divorce Dilemma

The biggest threat to marriage today is fear of its dissolution.

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we’ve now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early ’80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged, and young Americans typically express both fear and a moral horror at divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety, even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it’s for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we’ve ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

Presence of Marriage, Not Absence of Divorce

Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.—Homer Simpson

The divorce rate hasn’t fallen because Americans are better able to make and keep strong marriages. It’s fallen because many Americans, especially those in the middle class and lower, have given up on marriage entirely. The National Marriage Project’s 2010 “State of Our Unions” report found that while only 6 percent of highly educated mothers had their children out of wedlock, 44 percent of children of “moderately educated” women and 54 percent of children of the least educated women were born outside marriage. The “marriage gap” has made marriage a luxury good, the Ivy League of social institutions.

Fear of divorce is one major factor in the decline of marriage. A 2011 study by researchers at Cornell University surveyed 122 young cohabiting men and women and found that two-thirds cited worries about divorce as factors in their decision not to marry yet:

Most frequently mentioned was a desire to ‘do it right’ and marry only once, to the ideal partner, leading some to view cohabitation as a ‘test-drive’ before making ‘the ultimate commitment.’ The belief that marriage was difficult to exit was mentioned nearly as frequently, with examples of how divorce caused emotional pain, social embarrassment, child custody concerns, and legal and financial problems.

As this study suggests, terror at the thought of divorce has produced a strong cultural script for how to make a good marriage. Attempts to suggest that cohabitation or premarital sex are problems (rather than solutions), or that marrying when you’re in your early twenties lets you start your real life of love and family-making when you’re at the peak of your fertility, are met with cries of, “Oh, sure, do you want me to get divorced?”

The script requires a long waiting period before marriage. Twenty-seven is typical, as Rachel Jacoby wrote in a starkly judgmental December 29 piece at the Huffington Post; thirtysomething is better. Unsurprisingly, this long wait makes premarital chastity extraordinarily difficult. Perhaps less obviously, premarital chastity is actively discouraged. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying, quote psychologist Jeffrey Arnett: “Those who do not experiment with different partners are warned that they will eventually wonder what they are missing, to the detriment of their marriage.”

Cohabitation is also strongly encouraged. How can you marry someone if you don’t know what it’s like to live with her? There’s a sense that cohabitation allows the relationship to be tested and to build slowly over time—as you learn to care for her when she’s sick, or resolve arguments rather than going to bed angry—that you learn the skills of marriage before you reach the altar.

There’s one other way in which fear of divorce makes marriage an endlessly receding goal: the cost of weddings. The average wedding costs between $26,000 and $27,000—and that’s after a recession-driven drop. It’s easy to judge people who, say, release 50 Persian cats to eat the imported doves who eat the organic birdseed they throw instead of rice. But even a “normal” wedding these days requires an enormous outlay of cash. Or consider the standard formula for determining a reasonable price for an engagement ring: anywhere from one to three months of salary.Expensive, splashy weddings are about a lot more than princess fantasies. They’re a way of signaling the seriousness of the couple’s commitment. They make the wedding—and therefore, one hopes, the marriage—a major investment.

In their excellent 2005 study “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas found that even desperately poor women wanted a wedding they considered “elaborate” and “big.” This might mean spending a few thousand dollars, rather than more than $20,000, but it’s still money they generally don’t have. Why? “Having the wherewithal to throw a ‘big’ wedding is a vivid display that the couple has achieved enough financial security to do more than live from paycheck to paycheck, a stressful situation that most believe leads almost inevitably to divorce. Hosting a ‘proper’ wedding is a sign that the couple only plans to do it once, given the obvious financial sacrifice.” An expensive wedding is evidence of the strength of the couple’s commitment—yet it’s obvious how raising the cost of weddings raises the barriers to marriage.

Possibly in response to divorce scripts like “We just fell out of love” or “It just happened,” which emphasize powerlessness, the contemporary delayed-marriage script attempts to crack the code, figure out the formula, and do it right. Anxiety is managed through attempts at control. The fact that marriage, like parenting, is mostly about acceptance, forgiveness, and flexibility in the face of change and trauma gets suppressed.

But that might not matter if the script itself worked most of the time. If premarital sex and cohabitation were really the most practical paths to lasting love, our culture would look very different. Instead, these actions—valorized by young people, and often by their parents because they’re thought to prevent divorce—are divorce risk factors. Cohabitation with one partner is no longer correlated with increased risk of divorce, as it used to be, but serial cohabitation still is. In other words, if the only romantic partner you move in with ends up marrying you, your statistical prognosis is rosy; otherwise, not so much. In other words, “test-driving” the relationship only works—or rather, remains statistically neutral in terms of later divorce risk—if the relationship is already strong enough for marriage.

The picture with delayed marriage is somewhat different, but even there, as Regnerus and Uecker write, “the most significant leap in avoiding divorce occurs by simply waiting to marry until you’re 21. … In a meta-analysis of five different surveys that explored marriage outcomes, researchers note that respondents who marry between ages 22 and 25 express greater marital satisfaction than do those who marry later than that.”

“Mommy and Daddy Love You Very Much, But…”

Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise—whether you do or not?—“Vanilla Sky,” 2001

Delaying marriage has one other major cost: the pain of children who experience the breakup of their unmarried parents. While avoiding marriage may shelter adults from the stigma of being divorced and children from the legal wrangling of custody battles, children whose unmarried parents break up still experience deep loss. They typically lose their fathers over time, and they learn the same painful lessons as children of divorce about the fragility of love. They, too, have to grow up too soon, negotiate relationships with half-siblings or blended families, manage the emotions and pain of the adults in their lives, and experience the loss of the father’s extended family.

Most people today understand that while people are resilient and can overcome childhood pain and difficulties, being a “child of divorce” is rough. Movies like “The Squid and the Whale” focus on the experience; it comes up often in pop culture as a shorthand explanation for a character’s challenges with commitment or relationships. By contrast, being a “child of an unmarried breakup” isn’t even a thing, culturally. When someone talks about his experiences, people can recognize and acknowledge them, but the idea that marriage produces children who suffer when the marriage breaks up is much more deeply culturally embedded, more vivid and persistently available than the idea that cohabitation or unmarried relationships produce children who suffer when the relationship dissolves.

The New Judgmentalism

But with the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide.—Chris Ware,Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth

Finally, moral horror at divorce can easily slide into moral horror toward other people. If there’s a plan that can prevent divorce, then making the “wrong” choices allows everyone to I-told-you-so as they feel better about themselves and their own decisions. People have a deep-seated thirst for self-righteousness, and in a culture where most of the old expressions of moral distaste are themselves stigmatized, we find new outlets for our crueler needs for self-comfort.

This self-comfort is exercised partly at the expense of the divorced. A friend of mine recently spent a great deal of time talking online with a group of older women, most of whom are widowed or divorced, and the contrast between how those two groups are treated socially is hard to exaggerate. The generosity and gentleness we rightly extend to the bereaved are matched by a ferocious stigma applied to the divorced. It’s all too easy for the anti-divorce culture to become uncharitable, unforgiving, and ridden with unkind assumptions about who gets divorced and why.

We also comfort ourselves at the expense of people planning marriages that don’t fit the rules. Couples who refuse to cohabit or who marry young are scolded, warned that they’re setting themselves up for divorce, and held up as bad examples.

A culture of love can’t be built on a foundation of rejection. The path forward doesn’t include further stigmatizing divorce, or bringing back stigma against unmarried childbearing. Lack of charity in these areas will only lead to less marriage (in the case of stigma against divorce) and more abortions (in the case of stigma against unmarried childbearing). What young people need is hope: a sense that marriages can last, not because the spouses were smart enough on the front end but because they were gentle and flexible enough during the long years after the wedding. Cultural storytellers can focus on telling stories about how marriage happens and how it works. One of the best descriptions I’ve seen of the damage done to our marriage culture by fear of divorce ran on Cracked.com, the foul-mouthed humor website. “John Cheese’s” January 5 piece, “The 5 Reasons Marriage Scares Men (Aren’t What You Think),” drew on his experience of parental divorce, the breakup of his marriage, and the long road he took to propose to his fiancee. It’s possible to discuss even these most personal dreams and anxieties with bluntness, compassion, and indeed crude jokes.

Four decades after the divorce revolution, we know how to fear. What we need to learn is how to hope.

Thanks, Eve, for a thoughtful article. I’ve been a fan of yours since 9/11.

I am a child of an appropriate divorce, raised as seamlessly as possible (nothing’s painless) by a truly wonderful adoptive father. I was married at 25 to someone from a less conservative background and we’re raising two kids. As such:

When I was young, in the 90s, my liberal, secular friends were beginning to say “don’t sleep with him, it’ll break your heart.” Meanwhile, otherwise gentlemanly men were still saying “what if we’re not sexually compatible?” (Yikes. I’m not your training wheels.) Many people did move in together, but I can’t think of a case in which they didn’t marry, nor do I think these marriages have broken up.

I wish couples were more aware of the social science data about cohabitation and divorce. I knew that it was generally bad, and that helped me. I thought of cohabitation not as practice marriage, but as practice in keeping your guard up. I did not and do not need any more of that.

I do agree that even in conservative subcultures, premarital chastity will be a challenge until we get the age of marriage down. I expect that historical data on pregnant brides bear this out.

That said, there can be tough choices between young marriage and a woman’s post-collegiate education, which are cousin to the equally real tension between motherhood and work, or at least career. I have seen these glossed over, and I have seen dogmatic assertions that there is only one answer, and I get mad every time. We can afford to be realists.

And the stigma of divorce also makes me angry. I knew a woman who took her toddler and left her abusive husband. Years later, she was still hiding the date of her (second) wedding anniversary from the neighbors lest they look at her grown (!) children and do the math. More culture of love, please. Absolutely.

For myself, I wish that I understood what makes a model midlife marriage. I know the aphorisms, but here a good psychological novel might do wonders.

Divorce and child custody and harrassment laws and family laws etc are all biased in favor of the female gender. The laws and their precedents are still written for a time when women didnt work and had little power.

Today, the recessions are overly biased toward the male gender, educational system is biased toward the female gender with roughly 2 females graduating for every 1 male.

Further, women still want to be strong and powerful (ie the feminists) but they still want the advantages of being weak..and they still want a traditional spouse / father that is employed. so women arent getting married at all and if they do…they arent locked into it. Women who dont need men also see men equally willing to walk away.

this is what liberals and feminists gave us in the cultural revolution.

Re: marrying when you’re in your early twenties lets you start your real life of love and family-making when you’re at the peak of your fertility, are met with cries of, “Oh, sure, do you want me to get divorced?”

Precipitate marriage is a bad idea, period– marriages are much more likely to fail when they are entered into by younger people. That’s a reality we need to accept, and in fact it’s not even a modern one. “Marry in haste, prepent at lesiure” is a medieval proverb. And indeed for much of history, except among the elite, most men did not marry until they were in their mid to late 20s and had established themselves in life. Today that applies to women also.
I do not get why this is such a problem. Too many divorces, yep. Too many children in single parent families, yep. But the fact that people are not rushing off to the altar with the ink barely dry on their diplomas– nope, that’s not a problem. In fact, it’s common sense!

Marriage is treated more and more like a circus the further it gets associated with the legal class of the same name. Honestly, if there was one “social” policy I would spend a wish on, it would be to remove that class entirely.

The rejection of marriage by young men in particular is an entirely rational act. They have broken the code, usually because they saw what happened to their dads – mom walked out, ruining dad financially and emotionally, and the boys were horrified.

As long as divorce, and even more child custody, laws so massively favor women, no sensible men in the USA should get married. Telling them to “man up” is counterproductive and immoral.

I am a committed Christian and I believe in marriage in the abstract, and am horrified by the secondary effects of the decline of marriage, but I am also a realist.

This article is well intentioned but misses the forest from the trees; Eve has causes and effects confused – as nearly all women do on this issue.

Mormonism and Islam are odd religions, but they have kept more or less traditional gender arrangements, which is why they are prospering, particularly in the production of children. The post-Christian West is dying off because of the massive bias in favor of women since at least the 1960s – and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

PS The whole “risk of divorce” issue is BS — the “risk” is almost entirely on the female side in the USA, where women initiate divorce 70% of the time officially, but in practice women cause the divorce 90% of the time (eg they walk out with the kids, forcing the father to file for divorce to even see his children) … so the “risk” is on the female side — should they “woman up,” Eve?

Part of the problem is that it is too easy to get divorced with no-fault divorces. Basically the married parties can have 5 children together but be bored with one another and get divorced without counseling, deliberation on their actions or a care about the repercussions to society. The divorce laws should be changed that once someone has children, there has to be an appropriate reason i.e. spouse mistreatment, physical and/or mental abuse, drug or alcohol abuse etc.

As long as women can continue to profit from divorce they will continue to initiate 90% of them. She can be unfaithful and still get the house, the kids, child support and alimony. Men are starting to wise up and women don’t like that one bit. This guy has the right idea:http://dalrock.wordpress.com/

Marriage, or the real offer to marry, transfers the natural right to guardianship from the mother to the father.
It’s the only natural right that can be transferred. The salvation of marriage is dependent on the state’s protection of this natural right. We can make no law that unjustly interferes with this sacred contract.

Our state custody statutes are constitutional only if they are applied to children who are dependent on the state for their support, children without a natural guardian. State custody statutes enable an administrative tribunal to place wards of the state. If a divorcing mother aquires the status of guardianship by the termination of the father’s right to it, she aquires the status by right, not by an act of the courts.

If guardianship by right is with the father, state laws regulating the placement of wards of the state do not apply to him or his legal status as the children’s rightful guardian. The standard of review for terminating parental rights is higher than it is for the placement of a state ward, for obvious reasons.

While the statues can terminate the marriage license for no cause, which is asinine public policy when the law is rightfully applied, it cannot interfere with the father’s right to guardianship without cause. This is what keeps marriages together without the “aid” of the state.

The “custody” laws are unconstitutional when they are applied without consideration of the lawful status of the parents. Family courts cannot “award custody” in contravention of the lawful guardianship rights of a father or the mother. The state can terminate the statutory marriage under “no fault” laws, but the rights of a lawful guardian cannot be ignored. The states obligation to protect the lawful guardianship status of parents did not change with the advent of “no fault divorce” laws. It only became easier to distract the legal community and their customers into thinking they had lost their common law right to marriage because of some arbitrary legislation.

Dean is right on the money! With or without children a separation period should be required, except perhaps on physical abuse. Weddings don’t have to be expensive unless you want to show off or are nervous about the relationship. I know a couple who spent, what?, a $1000 dollars on their wedding and are still happily married after 34 years. Bridal shower gifts need to include the receipts of purchase, something I did and got a heart felt thank you for. What newly weds need 15 toasters,etc. My parents divorced after 30+ years and it was the best thing that happened to my father, my mother instigated the divorce over infidelity and ended up being a miserable drunk the rest of her live. My stepmother and I get along like to peas in a pod, even after my fathers death. Strange how life works.

“People have a deep-seated thirst for self-righteousness, and in a culture where most of the old expressions of moral distaste are themselves stigmatized, we find new outlets for our crueler needs for self-comfort.”

Many of the relevant “old expressions of moral distaste” aren’t just stigmatized, they’re actually illegal. Some states bar discrimination on the basis of marital status in housing, which means landlords and hoteliers can’t run a “respectable establishment” that shuns unmarried couples.

This deprives the old morals of geographic territory and social strength. The old morals then seem heavily abstract and arbitrary, since they cannot be lived in a community.

Re: Mormonism and Islam are odd religions, but they have kept more or less traditional gender arrangements, which is why they are prospering, particularly in the production of children.

Birth rates are also falling in Muslim countries. In Iran they are already below replacement.

As for the Mormons, it’s a myth that Mormon women are tethered to the kitchen and the nursery. My older step-sister is a Mormon– divorced (from a non-Mormon husband) and working full time as a help-desk manager for a major bank (she has always had a full time job). The LDS has certain expectations of her (mainly that she tithe and that she do the volunteer work assigned her by her bishop), but a “traditional gender role” is not one of them.

The problem with trying to prevent same-sex marriage is that is creates a battle over marriage, which has the potential to end marriage as a legal contract, and relegate it to nothing more than a religious contract, like a Bris or Baptism. The Constitution affirms equality, and creating classes of people who can marry the person they love defies that equality. As long as marriage confirms actual legal rights that non-married people do not have, it is problematic.

Ditto Kevin (so-called ‘free’ markets are only truely open when commerce between voluntary subjects to trade can decline the terms or price demanded for entry into binding — constrained in time and place and therefore able to be “hedged” with insurance — contractual relationship). Marriage is a covenant not a contract precisely because we cannot know the constraints of time and place and attach price or terms in advance. The bond is one-ended (unconditional, lifelong, exclusive fidelity) and cannot be hedged. What unmarried cohabitors attempt is to hedge before price discovery (illogical of course, such a calculation can’t be done if you don’t know the value of the polynomial expression you seek to optimize). I know. I tried it. My son (daughter-in-law, grandchildren and step siblings) is still paying the premium on his parents’ failed hedge.

Great to see Eve’s writing at TAC – well argued, hi-lighting the perverse techne of policy preferences ill-fitted to the personal ends sought “Lack of charity in these areas will only lead to less marriage (in the case of stigma against divorce) and more abortions (in the case of stigma against unmarried childbearing).” and supremely poignant poesie on the harm still being wrought “By contrast, being a “child of an unmarried breakup” isn’t even a thing, culturally.”

p.s. for those who, like hubbie and me, experience unresolved pain in marriage from ill-considered hedging, may I recommend the Christian peer ministry Retrouvaille? Its a wounded-healer kind of thing, those who struggled and prevailed share the experience with those still in need of hope, our local chapter was featured in the diocesan magazine last month, see here:http://faithcatholicdigital.com/publication/?i=98453

Fran Mcadam: You’re hilarious. BTW Marxism is a Jewish, not Christian, heresy, and feminism comes from Marxism, not Christianity. Facts are important. Christ would not have known what “feminism” was if it fell on him. Have you actually read the New Testament?

JonF: You’re almost as hilarious. When you find those “rightwing” feminists give them my number, sounds hot. I think they hang out with the “rightwing” focoists and Trotskyites.

Sean, does parsing your argument thus “As long as life confirms actual legal rights that dead people do not have, it is problematic.” help you see the fallacy of ‘equality’ you are proposing we join you in ascribing to? Sorry, but no can do. Life-giving unions aren’t the same thing as non-life-giving unions, and no amount of law or irrational sentimentality about fraternal equality under those laws can change mother nature’s hold on the terms of life that is fraternal, ie two persons sharing a mother and father who hooked up long enough* for them to be born sequentially.
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* Twins are a special case. Mother nature is in charge then too, usually. Except when techne separates the union of human gametes from gonads yielding to third-party glass vessels instead, a category of adultery even the gothic poesie of a Mary Shelley did not foresee in her dystopian Frankenstein.

Oh, this is a bunch sheer nonsense! They make it seem as if this century was the only one that had dissovled relationships..marriages included..and that children are not entirely to blame, wake up. Imagine this for one moment: ( No disrespect intended to anyone) Would you have divorced if you never had kids? If you say no, perhaps, as this article seems to reach out, to the outer edges of the “material”..time for people to change, not “society” DUH.

Brilliant! Also know of happily commited couples who wish to marry in their early 20s blocked by disapproving parents who are trying to “spare” their children from a sure divorce by wedding too young.

Parents will attempt break up their happily coupled children & couples who want to marry are strenuously counselled to wait if the couple has not had years of sowing wild oatswith multiple partners.

Seemingly happy long married couple suddenly divorce! Why?

They will say they were too young or have not had sufficient sexual partners premarriage ie they didn’t sow enough wild oats premarriage which inevitably precipitated the ugly devastating divorce. They could have been spared all the agony if they had only broken up while happily coupled & had a multitiude of relationships & hookups. Otherwise, they will go crazy after decades of wedded bliss, wonder about all the sexual partners they missed out on & dump their spouse & family to regain what they should have had years ago.

A couple starting out still in school or not financially well off are advised to delay wedlock. Stress causes divorce! Lack of money causes divorce! Only the financially comfortable should ever consider marriage.

The idea that marriage means sharing good times & bad, that hard times are easier to shoulder when in a lifetime committed marriage are considered naive.

The couples who start married life with very little, work together to build a life & share the burdens are considered foolish & recklessly risking divorce.

I have at once a fear for our future with the seemingly decline of educated couples raising children, and a fear of marriage itself. Twelve years ago was my last chance to become married and be a father. Instead, my girlfriend and I broke up. Economically, I have been far better off since then. I started consulting and moved to eight different cities for a year or so the last dozen years. It has made me just about financially independent. My girlfriend ended up marrying and gave birth to two children, then got divorced and is still presumably divorced. It could have been me who she divorced. I do not know the answer, but it must be that government should stay out of the issue of the decline of marriage. I cannot stand social engineering whether from the right or the left.

Devildawg – the idea that Marxism is a Jewish heresy is a common misconception based on the fact that many atheist Jews were leaders in the early Marxist movement and saw a way to social acceptence in the west for themselves and their people in a radically egalitarian future. But you can not explain Marxism without Christian concepts such as the day of judgement, the return of Christ and kingdom of heaven on earth. The radical spiritual equality in the gospels mirrors the hopes for physical equality Marxism promises. William f Buckley pointed this all out when he accused Marxists of wanting to immanentize the eschaton. You could call Marxism a Judeo-Christian heresy but to try and drop the Christian connection is ahistorical and really an abdication of cultural and intellectual responsibility on the part of western Christians who try to sloft off the historical responsibility for Marxism onto Hebrews. The roots of this kind of ideological scapegoating are ugly and unholy if you care to look into them.